ONEpl and WEI Submission to CRPD Committee Review of Poland

This submission describes human rights violations against women and girls with disabilities in Poland. These violations include discrimination, stereotypes, exclusion from public participation, and lack of data collection; higher rates of gender-based violence; sexual and reproductive rights violations including forced sterilization and abortion as well as lack of access to respectful maternal health care, contraception, and abortion services and comprehensive sexuality education; discrimination in education and employment; and denial of legal capacity. This submission also outlines how Poland’s reservations to the CRPD impact women and girls with disabilities and violate the object and purpose of the treaty, calling on Poland to withdraw those reservations.

Through this submission, our organizations make the following key recommendations:

• Engage women and girls with disabilities and their organizations in consultation, design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of programs, initiatives, policies, and laws that affect them.
• Collect data on gender-based violence that is disaggregated by disability, and specifically address the forms of gender-based violence experienced particularly by women and girls with disabilities.
• Ensure that sexual and reproductive health information and services is available, accessible, acceptable, and of good quality for women and girls with disabilities and is always provided on the basis of free and informed consent.
• Take targeted measures to address the low rate of employment of women with disabilities, including by addressing barriers to education for women and girls with disabilities.
• Abolish the existing laws the permit deprivation of legal capacity. Replace these laws with flexible instruments through which an individual can obtain decision-making support, when needed and requested.“
• Immediately withdraw all reservations to the CRPD.
• Ratify the Optional Protocol to the CRPD.